*All three* chapters on Vice were clotted with mistakes. Lots of them. The truth promised in Merchants of Truth was often not true. While trying to corroborate certain claims, I noticed that it also contained...plagiarized passages.
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019
Source:
https://scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2185259/did-jill-abramson-plagiarise-portions-her-new-book United States & Canada
Did Jill Abramson plagiarise portions of her new book ‘Merchants of Truth’? Read these tweets …
- Abramson appearing on Fox News, disputed the allegations, but later tweeted she would ‘review the passages in question’
Jill Abramson: ‘I take seriously the issues raised and will review the passages in question’. File photo: AP
Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson is facing allegations that she lifted material from other sources for her new book.
A Twitter thread posted Wednesday by Vice correspondent Michael Moynihan lists several examples of passages in Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts that closely resemble material in The New Yorker, Time Out and other publications.
The following examples from the final book—not the galley—are only from the Vice chapters (I didn’t check the others). So let’s begin...Here is Abramson on Gavin McInnes (whom she interviewed) and the Ryerson Review of Journalism https://t.co/hx0XcyZ89k pic.twitter.com/qroN59gyVk
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019
This passage, on former Vice News editor Jason Mojica, is lifted from a 2010 Time Out magazine piece, with small modifications: https://t.co/csNoONZQhX pic.twitter.com/aiQzwKEStl
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019
This paragraph can be sourced to two places: a *masters thesis* and a 2013 New Yorker piece by Lizzie Widdicombe https://t.co/ZWX5RgKxlahttps://t.co/Ux6gdDO9Qg pic.twitter.com/tSIKyRoKDP
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019
Released this week, Merchants of Truth is a critique of the news business focused on two long-running newspapers, The Times and The Washington Post, along with Vice and fellow digital company BuzzFeed.
Appearing Wednesday on Fox News, Abramson disputed the allegations, saying: “All I can tell you is I certainly didn’t plagiarise in my book and there’s 70 pages of footnotes showing where I got the information.”
Writers are generally expected to credit their sources directly in the body of the text if the material is similar.
She later tweeted: “I take seriously the issues raised and will review the passages in question. I endeavoured to accurately and properly give attribution to the hundreds of sources that were part of my research.”
I take seriously the issues raised and will review the passages in question
— Jill Abramson (@JillAbramson) February 7, 2019
Here is @JillAbramson's response to @mcmoynihan's tweets regarding plagiarized passages in her book from FNC's "The Story with Martha McCallum" (cc @mattwelch @anthonyLfisher @kmele @brianstelter @greggutfeld) pic.twitter.com/dpGNGrW0sy
— Andrew Wimsatt (@ajwimsatt) February 7, 2019
Cary Goldstein, executive vice-president of publicity at Simon & Schuster, which published Merchants of Truth, said in a statement it was “an exhaustively researched and meticulously sourced book”.
“It has been published with an extraordinary degree of transparency toward its subjects; each of the four news organisations covered in the book was given ample time and opportunity to comment on the content, and where appropriate the author made changes and corrections,” Goldstein said in the emailed statement.
“If upon further examination changes or attributions are deemed necessary we stand ready to work with the author in making those revisions.”
For her book, Abramson was assisted by John Stillman, whom she credits with helping her with research, reporting and writing. Stillman, a freelance journalist who has written for Gothamist and The Awl among others, declined to comment when reached by telephone.
Abramson wrote for The Times and The Wall Street Journal among others before becoming The Times’ first female executive editor in 2011.
She was fired three years later after frequently clashing with fellow staff members. She currently teaches creative writing at Harvard University.
Her previous works include Strange Justice, a book about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that was co-written by Jane Mayer.
Additional reporting by The Washington Post